Librarian of the Future

The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith

I put this book on hold at my small library system maybe a couple of days after it was revealed that one J.K. Rowling had actually written it, back in July, and it only took three months for it to make its way to me! I was pretty excited to see it arrive, finally, after I had seen it go out to so many other readers, and it went straight to the top of Mount TBR.

When I started reading it, I was less excited. The story was incredibly cinematic, with people doing things while they talked and every little thing being narrated and I was like, hey, there’s a dead person, how about we focus on that, maybe, and not this Doom Bar beer that your PI is obsessed with? But soon either Rowling let up on the description or the awesome mystery just overshadowed it, and the book got pretty dang readable.

The mystery at hand is that there’s a pretty model girl who fell to her death from her apartment balcony and everyone was sad but it pretty much had to be suicide and so life went on. But then the pretty girl’s brother shows up at the office of Cormoran Strike, hard-up private investigator who agrees to take the brother’s cash even though he’s pretty sure that he’s going to call it for suicide also. Of course, things quickly get more interesting and complicated and Strike starts to think maybe there was a murder here after all.

Throughout this whole murder mystery story, we also learn a lot about Strike, who we meet as a guy whose PI venture is about to go bust and whose relationship just has and who becomes by the end of the story a pretty nuanced guy with a rocky relationship history and family issues and a military background and one leg and a serious obsession with this Doom Bar beer. Rowling devotes a lot of time to making all of her characters pretty rounded, largely by throwing red herrings at them and ruining their alibis and such but whatever, it counts. She also brings in a lot of class and social issues that I did not know were a thing, or were still a thing, and as you figure out how all of these characters and their various societal constructs interact and relate to each other you also figure out how this mystery is going to end.

Well, maybe not so much that last part, because when it was revealed whodunnit I was like, I’m sorry, whodunnit? Really? Are you sure? And then Rowling was like, of course I’m sure, I wrote this whole book about it and maybe if you’d read it closer, but whatever, let me explain this to you. There was a little Holmes-ian “I have solved the mystery before you even heard it, here are some details I made up on the spot that just so happen to be absolutely right” to the solution, but those details were certainly borne out in the text and it made sense with the characters and what we had thus far learned about them. I may think that the murderer is a complete idiot, but a) of course, we’re talking about a murderer and b) of course, this murderer has been kind of an idiot the whole time.

There was a bit of controversy all those many months ago about the fact that Rowling used a pseudonym to write this book, and blah blah tricksy and blah blah marketing ploy. While it’s true that I had never heard of the book until I found out Rowling wrote it, it’s also true that if I had heard of it I would probably have ended up reading it and I still would have kind of loved it. The only thing I really object to is the fake bio made for Mr. Galbraith, which appropriates a very specific identity that is patently false and makes an intriguing juxtaposition with the concepts of identity in the novel, but only if you know that there’s a pseudonym involved.

I also find it odd that the publisher apparently chose to do the bare minimum to promote the book, because it is quite good and should have gotten at least as much press in my own bookish circles as many terrible books I’ve recently read did. I don’t know if this was some big conspiracy to make people read less-promoted books, but I’ve certainly been looking at my library’s big shelf of New Books I’ve Never Heard Of a little differently.

Post navigation

2 thoughts on “The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith”

I liked this one a lot too – but my copy must have been printed after the reveal, because it didn’t have an author bio and I was sad to miss out on knowing who they said Galbraith was! I too was surprised by the whodunnit, and the social/class stuff was a cool addition to the story.

“Robert Galbraith spent several years with the Royal Military Police before being attached to the SIB (Special Investigation Branch), the plainclothes division of the RMP. He left the military in 2003 and has been working since then in the civilian security industry. The idea for Cormoran Strike grew directly out of his own experiences and those of his military friends who returned to the civilian world. ‘Robert Galbraith’ is a pseudonym.”